Resumption ameliorates different islands differentially

Abstract

Two acceptability experiments are presented which assess whether resumptive pronouns freely alternate with gaps and/or ameliorate island violation effects in wh-questions in Modern Standard Arabic. Both experiments test Complex Noun Phrase Constraint violations, adjunct island violations, and whether island violations. The results indicate that resumption is largely only acceptable with structurally complex DP fillers (which-NP) and is generally preferred to gapped structures in long-distance dependencies. Resumption is also shown to ameliorate the grammatical component of some island violations (adjunct and whether islands), but in different quantitative amounts across different islands. The overall picture which emerges is one in which resumption is quantitatively, but perhaps not qualitatively, helpful in repairing grammatical constraint violations in Modern Standard Arabic. 0 Thanks to Souad Al Helou for assistance with stimuli creation and experimental procedure. Thanks to Salam Khalifa and Anas Shahrour for help with stimuli preparation. Thanks to the members of the United Arab Emirates University, Tommi Leung, and arabic-L email list for assistance with participant recruitment. Thanks to Jim McCloskey, Dustin Alfonso Chacón, two anonymous reviewers, and audiences at the 30 th Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics and University of Minnesota for comments on previous versions of this work. All remaining faults are ours alone.

Island effects in Spanish comprehension

“…Sprouse and colleagues' paradigm was later replicated in English and extended to Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Norwegian, Slovenian, Hebrew and Arabic (Sprouse et al 2011;Almeida 2014;Michel 2014;Aldosari 2015;López Sancio 2015;Sprouse et al 2016;Kush et al 2018;Ortega-Santos et al 2018;Stepanov et al 2018;Keshev & Meltzer-Asscher 2019;Kush et al 2019;Tucker et al 2019). Table 1 provides an overview of these studies, which tested either the same or a subset of the four island types examined by Sprouse and colleagues.…”

“…Table 1 provides an overview of these studies, which tested either the same or a subset of the four island types examined by Sprouse and colleagues. In most cases, object extraction was tested in wh-questions with bare fillers (Sprouse et al 2011;2012;Almeida 2014;Michel 2014;Sprouse et al 2016;Kush et al 2018;Stepanov et al 2018), but some studies used relative clause, left dislocation or topicalization configurations, complex fillers (e.g., which book), subject extraction, or resumptive pronouns (Almeida 2014;Aldosari 2015;Sprouse et al 2016;Kush et al 2018;Ortega-Santos et al 2018;Keshev & Meltzer-Asscher 2019;Kush et al 2019;Tucker et al 2019).…”

“…Further, Stepanov and colleagues (2018) and Keshev and Meltzer-Asscher (2019) tested temporal interrogatives (introduced by when) and Ortega-Santos and colleagues (2018) tested causal interrogatives (introduced by why). All studies collected acceptability judgments with untimed tasks, using either magnitude estimation (Sprouse et al 2011;2012;Stepanov et al 2018) or a 7-point scale (Sprouse et al 2012: experiment 1; Almeida 2014; Michel 2014; Aldosari 2015; López Sancio 2015; Sprouse et al 2016;Kush et al 2018;Ortega-Santos et al 2018;Keshev & Meltzer-Asscher 2019;Kush et al 2019;Tucker et al 2019).…”

“…Sprouse and colleagues created an experimental paradigm that attempts to isolate island effects from possible confounding factors such as the distance between the filler and the gap. This paradigm has been fruitfully used across languages such as English, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Norwegian, Slovenian, Hebrew and Arabic (Sprouse et al 2011;2012;Almeida 2014;Michel 2014;Aldosari 2015;López Sancio 2015;Sprouse et al 2016;Kush et al 2018;Ortega-Santos et al 2018;Stepanov et al 2018;Keshev & Meltzer-Asscher 2019;Kush et al 2019;Tucker et al 2019). The current study applies this paradigm to Spanish, a language in which there have been few empirical studies, even though previous syntactic literature has reported varying acceptability between different island types.…”

Resumptive Pronouns in Baha Arabic: An Experimental Study

“…The debate is further complicated by divergence of findings between the theoretical and experimental literature on resumption. Experimental investigations on resumption in many languages, including Hebrew (Farby et al, 2010), Modern Standard Arabic (Tucker et al, 2019), Spanish (Perpiñán, 2020) and English (Keffala, 2011, among others), are not fully consistent with the claims of the theoretical literature. Specifically, while theoretical literature claims that resumption is common across languages in certain syntactic configurations, termed 'islands', this claim is not confirmed in experimental literature.…”